Re: [tlug] Proprietary derivatives of FLOSS and other absurdities

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Benjamin Tayehanpour writes:

 > I'm perfectly happy to define reciprocative behaviour by the actual
 > end result, regardless of motive or any personal gain which happens
 > to befall one along the way, intentionally or otherwise.

Adam Smith's device of the invisible hand, once again independently
discovered by a socialist centuries after he did.  Gotta love it!

But we economists know a lot about the invisible hand, and it doesn't
really help us understand much about either the value the stock market
perceives in Japanese corporate shares, nor the growth of FLOSS
adoption via both commercial offerings and developer social networks
(ie, mediated by the Internet).

Despite your frothy words about "averaging extreme political
positions", it seems to me that in practice these things are going to
be determined by the interests of large corporations, not by RMS and
Bono's widow.  Our best hopes for reducing the monopolies produced by
patent and copyright (although the latter doesn't matter much to
commercial software in practice) lie in IBM and Google lobbying[1]
vying with Disney and Microsoft's, not in RMS's extremism, which is
incoherent[2] and and unfair[3].


Footnotes: 
[1]  Which is not inconsistent with vigorous defense of existing IP
rights.

[2]  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#On_sex depends on
a distinction between "voluntary" and "coerced" which cannot be made
in practice without constant invasion of privacy.  Also, his specious
distinction between software and documentation.

[3]  Calling Dmitri Sklyarov a "traitor", despite Sklyarov's lack of
U.S. citizenship or avowal of the free software movement is his
classic public bobble in this direction.